The Disney Brothers Studio was set up in a garage on Kingswell Ave. in Hollywood,

California. As they had no staff to help produce the first six shorts, Walt animated

the films all by himself and Roy worked the camera for the live-action sequences.

There were no rehearsals for the live-action filming and usually no more than

a single take was shot as the Disneys didn't always have enough film to reshoot!

The first, Alice's Day at Sea was released on March 1, 1924.

Fifty-six Alice Comedies were produced between 1923 and 1927. By the time Alice the Peacemaker was in production in 1924, Disney had built a studio staff that now included animators Ub Iwerks and Rollin "Ham" Hamilton, and camera operator Harry Forbes.

Over the years 4 different young actresses - Virginia Davis, Dawn O'Day,

Margie Gay, and Lois Hardwick - portrayed Alice.

Virginia Davis, from Kansas City, first began working for Walt when she was just 6-years-old.

She appeared in the first 13 titles of the Alice Comedies. (Davis later did voice

testing for Snow White as well as some of the little boys' voices in Pinocchio.)

She became a Disney Legend in 1998.

Dawn O'Day - whose birth name was Dawn Evelyn Paris - only played Alice in the

1925 release Alice's Eggplant. As an adult actress she appeared in over 30 features

under the name Anne Shirley. (She is the mother of actress Julie Payne.)

Margie Gay appeared as Alice from February, 1925 to December, 1926. Unlike the

others, Margie had a short, straight black hairstyle with bangs over her forehead.

When she left, Walt hired Lois Hardwick to play the part of Alice.

(She went on to become the first wife of actor Donald Sutherland.)

The final Alice Comedy Alice in the Big League was released in Summer 1927. At this point Disney's staff also included Les Clark (who would become one of Walt's "Nine Old Men")

and Hugh Harman & Rudolf Ising (the duo who would become famous for starting the

Warner Bros. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer animation studios).

Walt and Roy enjoyed moderate success with these shorts, thus

enabling them to set-up a larger studio on Hyperion Avenue in

February 1926. Alice Comedies proved to be a major stepping stone

in Walt and Roy's career.

"It was very informal. We used to have a lot of people gathered around. During the silent days we would have a lot of the curious children and the neighbors come around to watch what was going on. They would use some of the children in some of the scenes as they did in one of my favorites, Alice's Wild West Show (1924), where they were used as the audience. There was no Screen Actors Guild so there was no place to go if you needed somebody for a film. You just used whomever was around at the time." -Virginia Davis on filming

"Gini was a very special lady who always took great pride in the historic role she played in our studio's

history. In fact, she liked to remind everyone that it all started with Alice, not Mickey Mouse."